Wednesday, August 18, 2010

help with the alphabet

Here are some resources for learning the Russian alphabet and the first couple of units of Голоса.

A list (in pdf format) of Russian sight words—these are calques from and homophones of English. (Not all the words are from English—some are words that both Russian and English borrowed from other sources, like Greek, Latin and German.)

A recording (mp3, your browser should just play it) of me, reading the words above. I’ve slowed down the recording a bit so that you’re better able to hear my pronunciation of individual phonemes.

A creepy version of the Russian alphabet from IKEA (the number one foreign investor in Russia!). In fact, the Russians don’t NEED an alphabet song, and no one sings it and no one teaches it to kids. It’s a phonetic alphabet—there aren’t really standardized names for the letters, as there must be in English. (How else would we explain how to spell our crazy words???)

The Golosa site, where you can listen to recordings of many of the exercises from the Алфавит (Alphabet) section.

For those of you who want to perfect your Russian cursive (пропись), some “worksheets” that I concocted (in .doc format).

And, while I’m at it, a link to the Golosa cards on FlashcardExchange website, where you can find all your work done for you…